Last spring we were presented with the challenge of bringing an e-Learning website up to date. The existing website was a bit difficult to navigate and had gads of out of date and boring stock photos. As many of you have heard me rant about before, I hate stock photography (most of the time). Especially the cheap, royalty free type. Its too generic, over-used, and impersonal. Additionally, if your stock imagery includes photos of people or technology, they can quickly look out of date. This was the case with Enterprise Training. Their stock photos had women in out of date clothing and men pointing at giant boxy computer screen (the kind you only see on curbsides).

Our challenge was to create simple custom graphics and avoid photography. Amanda worked her design magic and we went from this:

to This:

The biggest problem on the interior pages was that there were so many pages with sub-menus. The navigation was not consistent throughout the site. It was easy for a visitor to get lost. We solved this problem by creating three distinct navigation levels. The main navigation along top remains the same on every page. There is a sub-menu on the left side of internal pages. This applies to the particular page a visitor is on. The icons help visitors quickly identify the main areas of the website.

As you can see, we conceded to minimal use of stock photography, but kept it more relevant to the page it was on and bit bit more neutral. I promise you will not see any Dorothy Hamill haircuts or first generation PCs.

Visit the site and see the changes for yourself: Enterprise Training.